


Star Wars: In the Grey

by orphan_account



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angry Kylo Ren, Badass Rey, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Child Abduction, Comment if you want more chapters, Emperor Kylo Ren, F/M, Force Bond, Hope solo - Freeform, I'm bad at tags, Jedi, Kylo Ren Has Issues, Kylo Ren Needs a Hug, Kylo Ren and Rey Are Not Related, M/M, Mind Control, Minor Poe/Finn, Original Characters - Freeform, Reylo - Freeform, Rose/Finn was too rushed guys, Sith, Some Fluff, Some Heartache, The Force, They're Both A Little Older, Yes I still ship Poe and Finn, reylo child
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-05-28 05:07:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19387111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Seven years had passed and the war was still a threat.Seven years had passed and their daughter still acted like him, a man she'd never even met.Seven years and he'd finally found her.After a First Order attack on the Resistance's rebel base, Rey comes face-to-face with Kylo Ren and is forced to reveal her secret to him: They have a daughter together. Rey is sure that she doesn't want him in her daughter's life, but she finds that something isn't quite right with the fearsome Kylo Ren, something isn't quite him. Secrets unravel and plans are set in action, but you can't plan for something you don't know. Anything can go wrong.





	1. Chapter One

Rey’s fingertips whispered across the soft skin of her neck as the faintest memory of a plush set of lips against that same patch of skin flared across her mind. Too many years had passed since she’d felt his fingertips on her back, his lips on her neck, his hair against her cheeks. She leaned her head back against the tiles of her fresher as hot water cascaded down on her, burning her flesh in the most pleasurable of ways.

Her hand started to travel farther down when a muffled yelp broke her from her trance, causing a flurry of concern and worry to rush through her bare body. Rey turned off the fresher’s water and pulled on a fluffy, white robe as she called out, “Hope, are you okay?”

She left her fresher quickly and headed for the source of the noise with quick, light feet, but a small body slammed into hers before she could even make it down the hall. She peered down at the black curls of the little girl who was looking right back up at her and frowned. “Were you running in the apartment?”

As the only Jedi in the Resistance, Rey had been given a modest living space in the organizations most recent base. Her apartment was small, no bigger than it needed to be for just the two of them, and not big enough to fool around in. It had only taken one day for Hope to run through the halls, trip over her own feat, and smash into a table, causing Rey to make the dreaded ‘no running’ rule.

It seemed that her seven-year-old still hadn’t gotten a hang of the rule yet.

Hope shook her head, causing those notable curls to fly around her head. She backed away from Rey and stared up at her with innocent, hazel eyes. “No, I was . . . galloping.”

Rey raised a single brow. “Galloping?”

“Yes,” Hope replied simply as her arms came up to cross over her chest in a look that was all Kylo Ren—or was it Ben Solo?—and Rey frowned at the confidence behind the movement. “I was galloping.”

“Oh, well, I guess you can _gallop_ all the way to the meditation chamber,” Rey shot down at the little miss, watching with a slight smirk as her daughter’s triumphant smile was quickly replaced with an almost-frown.

“Meditation?” Hope groaned as she followed Rey to her chambers and clambered onto her bed while Rey pulled on some training clothes. “I don’t like meditation, Mom. It’s so boring. I want to spar!”

“You’re not ready to spar,” Rey reminded her casually as she pulled a grey vest over her plain, white blouse and tied it tightly together. “You are too young and too undisciplined, Hope. You could hurt your training partner or yourself.”

Hope muttered something under her breath, something that Rey elected to ignore, as Rey finished pulling her thigh-high boots up over her toned legs. She knew that it was a game to her daughter, the Force and all the power that came with it, but she’d be damned if she didn’t make sure the girl was safe.

“Hope, I know you hate meditation,” Rey said in a soft voice as she turned to stare down at her daughter. She looked so much like him with her dark hair in her eyes and her skin still so pale, even after years of training in the sun, and those big, almost comical ears of his that had someone wound their way onto their daughter. Rey’s heart burned at the sight as she continued her motherly talking to, “I don’t much care for it either–,”

Her words died as alarms blared through the base, screaming their song of danger and death. Rey immediately grabbed Hope’s hand while her unoccupied hand reached out with the Force and closed around her lightsaber as soon as it flew into her waiting palm; she was not going out there without her weapon.

“We have to get out of here, okay, Hope?” Rey said back to her daughter as she pulled her past the door to their small apartment and out into the crazed halls of the Resistance base. “Keep your hand in mine and be as quiet as possible, okay? Just follow me.”

She didn’t have to look behind her to know her daughter was following her. Even if she wasn’t holding the little girl’s hand, she would be able to feel her. By the stars, she could feel her daughter through the whole galaxy, across the Force, just as she felt Hope’s father.

He was there, too.

She knew it.

Even after all these years, Rey could still feel him in the back of her mind, in the darkest part of her soul. She could still feel his dark energy, that ferocious rage that sometimes scared even her, mixing with her light, a constant reminder of the night she’d cast aside her loyalties for just him and the small bit of light that still shone within him; the light within him hadn’t been enough to convince her to stay the next morning.

If she could still feel him, he could still feel her.

He knew she was there.

“Just around this corner,” Rey muttered to herself as she remembered the secret compartment Finn had found, the size of a storage closet really, for someone to hide in if things went wrong. She could hide Hope there while she fought. “It’s just around this corner–,”

She came to a stuttering halt when she felt more than saw his presence at the opposite end of the hall she’d just turned onto. Her eyes crashed to him at the same moment he finished cutting down brave Resistance soldiers with his red-spitting saber. She didn’t have time to back away before his eyes flew up and landed on hers.

“Rey,” he called out in a singsong voice that echoed with sinister thoughts. Even from how far away she was, she could see the way his eyes glowed yellow. Sith yellow. “Where have you been hiding, little scavenger?”

“Kylo, it’s been too long,” Rey answered as she sent her thoughts to Hope, telling her to stay behind Rey no matter what. Her eyes swept over the man she’d once thought she loved, maybe she still loved him, and her heart wilted at the sight. “You don’t look so good.”

He was a shadow of the man he’d once been. His body—once proud and strong, mighty—was slender, almost sickeningly slim and seemingly paler than it had been when she’d last seen him. His hair had always been long, but it hadn’t hung to his hips in strangled knots. The worst part of him, though, was still those beaming, yellow eyes.

“Time changes people,” Kylo replied as he looked her over as well, his eyes seeming to glow even brighter. “You’re looking fuller, much less like a desert rat than before.”

“You would’ve thought the person in the palace would be better fed than the Resistance lackey,” Rey shot towards him as she, once again, ran her eyes down the slim length of his body.

“One does tend to waste away when they rule alone,” Kylo said, almost sadly, as he hung his head.

Rey felt a pinch in her heart when she thought of how he’d offered her the chance to rule beside him, the chance to usher in a new era, but the pinch fell away when she saw his lip curl cruelly. She didn’t have time to shield herself when his hand came up and the Force pushed itself around her throat in a crushing grip.

He slammed her against a nearby wall. The metal dented with the force of the impact as the breath fell out of her, but she didn’t seem to care as her eyes found Hope’s widened gaze. _Walk, no, run away,_ Rey thought to the little girl as she struggled to overpower him with her own Force. _Get away from here, Little Hope._

Hope didn’t have time to react before Kylo noticed her and his grip on Rey wavered as he ran his gaze over the little girl, not missing her black curls and big ears. His eyes widened and, for a second, just a second, Rey thought she saw their glow dim into their usual deep brown, but he roared and the yellow returned.

“What is this? Some kind of illusion?” Kylo yelled at Rey as his cheeks began to take on a fiery red hue of anger. “Your tricks won’t work on me, Rey, not this time.”

Rey shook her head, or tried to, and captured the faint string that tied them together in her mind as she sent her memories his ways. Memories of her and him and them being bound together in the most entreating of ways. Memories of the nine months she’d spent avoiding him as her belly grew and grew. Memories of how she’d wished he was there when she’d welcomed her baby girl to the world. Memories of how she’d read a holo-article before falling to sleep that night that stated that Kylo Ren had committed genocide on the people of Jakku and she’d decided he’d never meet his daughter. She sent them all his way.

His eyes widened as he fell to his news and released his grip on her neck. Rey fell with him, her own knees cracked against the metal floor, as she gripped at her throat, trying to breathe in as much air as possible. Hope ran over to her mother, wrapping her arms around her slim waist in an attempt to hug more air into her.

Rey looked up when she’d finally managed to breathe without pain and found Kylo Ren staring back at her, at them, except his eyes weren’t yellow. His eyes were pained, not pain-inflicting. He kept his eyes connected to hers for a brief second before his gaze fell to Hope’s and then straight to the floor.

Those eyes weren’t Kylo Ren’s, not Rey knew him.

Those eyes were Ben Solo’s.


	2. Chapter Two

As soon as his eyes flew back to hers, Ben Solo vanished as if he’d never been there in the first place. Rey shivered at the fury she could feel rolling off of Kylo Ren in waves as he stared back at her and her daughter, whom Rey was cradling against herself with a tight grip, with anger burning in his eyes.

“Ben,” Rey whined, hoping that the sound of his name would bring him back, wanting the sound of his name to push away Kylo Ren’s evil. She hated herself for the piece of her heart that burned at the thought of having to slay him to protect Hope, though she knew she’d do it in a heartbeat. “Come back to me, to us.”

The hatred in his gaze flickered into something soft, something almost like love, yet the anger and the fear in his heart pushed it all down and away, buried it like all the students at Luke’s academy had been after he’d allowed Snoke’s men into the school. His eyes started to lighten to that strange, sickening yellow until they were practically glowing and he raised his hand, probably preparing to choke the life out of her.

Rey’s hand snuck down to her thigh, where her saber was hanging, just about to latch around the weapon when he shot into her mind and flicked it, like a switch, until there was nothing but darkness. The rest of the world fell away as she descended into the sweet nothingness of sleep. All she could think was, _Please, Force, please, don't let him hurt her. Just don't let him hurt Hope._

The darkness swimming around Rey fell away as she became aware of someone’s soft inhales from beside her. Confusion swelled within her as she tried to remember what had happened before the memories came for her in one fell swoop. Alarms, the First Order, Kylo, Ben, and . . . 

“Hope,” Rey called out as she shot bolt upright, her eyes darting around the room wilding as she sought out her daughter’s thin, yet tall form in a room of nothing but grey walls, grey floors, and even greyer furniture.

She turned towards where she’d heard breathing to find Kylo staring at her with an impassive gaze and eyes that were no longer glowing bright yellow, yet somehow still held all the sinister meaning behind those Sith-toned eyes. Instinctively, she reached out for the Force, only to feel nothing but an empty void where life usually thrummed within.

Rey’s eyes fell down to her hands in confusion as she tried not to whimper at the emptiness she felt in the hollow place where the Force used to be. Her eyes narrowed on her wrist where a chunky bracelet was latched around the thin, tanned skin with a red light beeping on its center. _A Force dampening cuff,_ Rey thought as she looked down at the gadget, _and it’s one of the newer models._

Rey turned back to Kylo with a ferocious snarl as she spat, “Where’s my daughter, you monster?” He continued to stare at her with those unmoving, unblinking eyes, until she yelled, “I swear by the Force, if you hurt her in any way, I will–,”

“I haven’t hurt her,” Kylo responded, effectively cutting Rey off as she wished desperately for him to tell her anything about her daughter’s well-being. He cocked his head to the side as if listening to a tune only he could hear before he said, “She’s sleeping in the other room, rather fretfully, I think.”

“I want to see her,” Rey said and started to climb out of the small, too-small for an emperor bed when he reached out a hand and stopped her with the Force. “What are you doing? I want to see my daughter!”

“Not yet,” Kylo gritted out as he rose to his feet and stared down at her with a gaze that she was sure was meant to be intimidating but seemed like only a shadow of his former self. “I have some questions that you are going to answer or, Force help me, I’ll–,”

“You’ll what?” Rey snapped with the venom of a snake as she rose from the bed and stared right back at him with the gaze of a mother bear, something that Finn had called her all-too-often. “You’ll hurt me? Kill me? You can’t, won’t, or you would’ve done it already.”

“Do not test me, Rey,” Kylo warned past clenched teeth as he calmly folded himself back into the leather chair he’d been sitting in. “You’ve been keeping my child from me for years, _years_ , Rey. I am not thinking too kindly about you at this moment.”

Rey let out a wry laugh as she shook her head ruefully. “Do you blame me?” she asked coldly as she stared back at him with her own impassive gaze. “You slaughtered the people of Jakku to get I don’t even know what. My attention? Millions of people, dead, by your hand.”

He didn’t even blink.

“Did you really think that I’d be like, ‘Okay, Hopie, let’s go visit your mass-murdering father?’ after you killed all the people I ever knew?” Rey hissed as she leaned forward, letting her face come within kissing distance of his. She held his gaze as she brought her forehead to his and whispered, “I would have killed you before I let her know you as anything more than a monster.”

He shoved her back against the bed and growled, “I did that because I had to, Rey,” as he started to pace the room with the wildness of a caged animal.

“I didn’t know that anyone _had_ to commit genocide,” Rey growled as she crossed her arms over her chest, much like Hope had earlier that day, and stood from the bed. She’d regret what she was about to say, but she had to say it anyway. “I didn’t know anyone _had_ to let their own mother get caught in their crossfire.”

Kylo’s prowling came to an abrupt stop as the words left her lips. She wasn’t even sure he was breathing as he turned to look at her with the wide, scared eyes of a little boy, a sight that burned Rey’s soul to shreds at how familiar it was; Hope always had the same look in her eyes when she woke from a nightmare.

“Rey, I–,” Kylo gulped and shook his head. His eyes started darting around the room wildly as he began to bang on the side of his head with his fist. “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” he muttered angrily as he continued to beat at his own skull.

“Kylo,” Rey murmured as she took a step towards him, concern for him outweighed any other feelings she had at the moment. He continued to hit the side of his head with enough force that she could see a split in his skin beginning to form. “Kylo, what are you doing? Stop that!”

She grabbed his hand before it could make contact with his temple again and she clasped it between her own to hands. When she looked up into the eyes of Kylo Ren, she saw the gaze of a man long-since lost, a man who was sure he wasn’t right in anything, and she reached up to cup his cheek with her palm.

“What’s going on?” she asked as she stared up into those eyes, those damned eyes that someone showed his every emotion better than anything else.

“It’s like Snoke but not,” Kylo answered in a mumbling tone. His words were scrambled, nothing more than empty sounds, yet she recognized them just as well as she recognized the cold, dark grip that pulled at the other end of the Force bond, the darkness it carried. “He’s in here, in me, and I can’t–I can’t stop it, Rey.”

It took Rey a long time, maybe too long, before she realized what he was saying. There was another, another Sith, talking to Kylo, coercing him, commanding him. All his decisions, all the bad things he’d done in the past seven years, weren’t actually his own. Someone else was in there, pulling the strings like a puppeteer, forcing Kylo to do his bidding.

Rey nodded as understanding hit her like a brick. Kylo—No, it would be Ben—Ben was still in there, still clinging to the Light as much as he could, and she had a way to save him. She knew she could save him. Rey continued to nod.

“Okay, okay,” Rey muttered as she curled her hand around his and pushed her other hand against his cheek. “We can fix this, Ben. We can save you.”

“I don’t know how,” he whispered as he tried to pull back, pull away, but she held him in place. “He’s strong, Rey, so strong. I can feel his rage, even from lightyears away, and his power. Force, he’s so powerful.”

“I know, I know,” Rey nodded, though she truly had no idea what they were dealing with, “but we will fix this, Ben, I promise.”

She wasn’t sure if she forgave him entirely for anything she knew he’d done. Whoever was controlling him had commanded him to do those terrible things, but Ben obviously still had some way to keep himself in check. After all, he was right in front of her, nearly crying, and begging her for help, so he should’ve been able to stop himself on Jakku. He should’ve been able to control himself. Shouldn’t he?

“Can I see her, Ben?” Rey asked in a small voice as she remembered that her little girl was in the other room, probably just as alone and scared as Ben felt. She wanted so badly to reach out and comfort her with the Force, yet the bracelet around her wrist made it impossible. “Please, I need to see her, to be with her.”

“She doesn’t know,” Ben murmured as he pulled away from her and turned to face the wall, “does she? She doesn’t know that I’m her father.”

Rey considered being compassionate and reassuring with her answer but she could only make herself say, “No, she doesn’t.”

“You didn’t want to tell her,” Ben assumed.

“Nobody knew but me, Leia, Finn, and Poe,” Rey replied in a calm tone, though a part of her trembled at the mention of her late mother-figure and the friends she wasn’t sure were dead or alive, “and Leia thought it would be best not to tell Hope about you. I, of course, agreed.”

“Hope,” Ben repeated as if testing her name on his lips. He glanced over his shoulders with an almost smile curled on his lips. “Who thought to call her that?”

“Leia,” Rey answered as the memory came unbidden to the forefront of her mind like a holovid replaying before her eyes.

_Rey cooed down at the little babe in her arms. The girl already had a mass of dark curls taking up the whole of her head and she seemed to have inherited the clunky ears of her father, but Rey couldn’t see anything wrong with her baby, not a single thing._

_“She’s perfect,” Leia said as she came to stand beside Rey with a bouquet of fresh flowers and some kind of stuffed animal in her hands. The older woman reached out and traced a fingertip down the child’s pale, chubby cheek. “Just as beautiful as a little star.”_

_“Yes, she is,” Rey cooed as she rocked her baby as gently as she could manage._

_Truth be told, Rey had never even held a baby before, let alone cared for one. Terror gripped her as she thought about all the things that could go wrong, all the ways she could traumatize the babe in her hands, all the ways she could disappoint her._ Force, _Rey thought_ , I’m not ready for this.

_“She’ll be the hope of the Galaxy one day,” Leia said, unaware of Rey’s plight, as she stared down at the babe, “if she wants to be, that is.”_

_“The hope–Hope,” Rey muttered as she stared down at the babe with wide, wondrous eyes. This child, this little thing that fit in the crook of her elbow, was her hope for something better, something good. “Hope, that’s right.”_

Rey snapped back to reality as Ben said, “Yeah, that sounds like something she would do. I mean, she named her son after her ‘only hope’ from the olden days.”

She felt impatience grow within her as she realized he didn’t seem all that keen to let her get out of this room any time soon; in fact, he seemed content to just stand there and talk and talk while her daughter was in the other room, probably wanting to see Rey just as much as Rey needed to be with her. “Ben, I need to see her,” Rey said in the coldest of voices to get his attention and let him know that she was dead serious, “right now.”

Ben gulped and nodded as he headed towards the door and pressed his hand against the panel near it. The panel seemed to scan his palm, which curiously wasn’t covered in the usual leather glove, and the door slid open with a quiet hiss, revealing another realm of grey past the confines of this room.

She followed Ben into the hallway and continued to walk behind him until he opened another door at the far end of the hall, revealing a room that wasn’t grey. From behind him, all she could see was black walls and black floors, yet she saw a flare of color somewhere further in the room, a flare of color that made her heart bit like a drum against her chest.

Rey slipped past Ben and stormed into the room without a care in the world as she saw her daughter lying in the middle of a huge bed with the same unharmed, yellow tunic she’d been wearing the last time Rey had seen her. A little whimper left her lips as Rey watched her curl herself around a nearby pillow, exactly as Hope always did, and she knew that it wasn’t a hologram or an illusion.

“Hope,” Rey whispered as she came to stay beside the bed and let herself run her fingers through the long, twisted mane of her daughter’s curls. She sighed in relief as she watched Hope’s chest rise and fall with her breathing. “Thank the Force, I was so worried.”

“I told you,” Ben said as he finally stepped into the room, his eyes glued to the sleeping form of her, their, daughter. He swallowed and lowered his eyes to the floor as he ran a large hand through his mussed black hair. “I couldn’t hurt her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just because of the warm reception of the first chapter, I decided to quickly write up a second chapter for y'all. Much love and I'll try to get another one out as soon as possible.


	3. Chapter Three

“I’m assuming we don’t have very long until he regains control,” Rey said to Ben as she turned her eyes away from her sleeping daughter’s form. Knowing that her little girl was safe, Rey could finally put her full focus on the big issue between them all. “We should go over our plan if we can even think of one.”

Ben gulped thickly as he nodded just once. “I agree,” he replied with his naturally thick voice, though it sounded even huskier than usual, “but I don’t know how much we can plan for. I don’t even know who _ he  _ is.”

Rey huffed, having already expected that. Snoke made a big mistake, always revealing himself to Ben, always torturing, always hurting. He’d plotted his own demise in every whimper he’d drawn from Ben’s trembling form. This . . . entity knew that Ben wouldn’t have tried to fight back unless he tried to hurt Ben, or, apparently, Rey and Hope. Still, they couldn’t fight against a shadow in the back of Ben’s mind.

Rey’s eyes drifted down to the Force-dampening cuff around her wrist and an idea brightened her mind. “What about this?” she asked as she held up her wrist. “I mean, he controls you through the Force, right? So, if you’re not connected to the–,”

“No, that won’t work,” Ben interrupted as he shook his head. “It’ll dampen my powers, sure, but he’ll still be able to get into my mind whenever he wants to because it won’t be dampening his powers.”

Rey deflated instantly at her first, and only, idea being shot down like a light. “What do you know about him?” Rey questioned as she lowered herself onto the bed next to Hope and sighed. “Anything could help us figure something out.”

Ben shrugged as he watched her movement with cat-like eyes, almost predatory in the way they flicked between her and the ceiling above their heads. “Nothing, really. I know he’s old, ancient, and he’s strong.”

“Not helpful,” Rey murmured, thinking about all the old Sith masters she’d studied. There had been so many, more than a couple dozen, and all of them had been strong enough to control him like Snoke had, especially after . . . Rey sprang up as a thought burst to the forefront of her mind. “When did he start–Ben, when did this start happening?”

Ben’s eyes, the same eyes that had been drifting back and forth between her and the ceiling, plummeted to the floor as his face seemed to pale in color, though his ears became bright red at her question. “After we, uh, did–After you–,”

Rey saw right through his flustered stutters and the blush painting his ears. She knew before she’d even asked the question. It would’ve been when he was the most vulnerable, when he was the most terrified. “It was after I stopped coming to you through the bond, wasn’t it?”

Ben managed to bring his eyes to her face and hold her gaze as he answered with a simple, “Yes,” and scrubbed a hand through his severely knotted hair, an impatient and embarrassed action that she recognized all too well.

“I was scared,” Rey blurted as an explanation, as a way to let him know that it wasn’t because of him that she’d shut him out when she’d been carrying Hope. His eyes stayed glued to hers, though she saw the way they widened almost imperceptibly. “When I found out I was pregnant, I was–Force, I was terrified.”

Ben’s dark brows scrunched together in the middle, his confusion forcing them to melt together as his mouth twisted to one side. “I would have never–,”

“I know you would’ve never hurt me or her,” Rey said softly in a hushed town. Her eyes fell to her hands where they were twisting around each other in her lap and she wished she had some machine to work on to calm her nerves as she started to explain. “It wasn’t about you, Ben, not really, not ever.”

“I’ve never had a mother,” Rey stated, knowing that he already knew that little tidbit about her life. “I don’t remember . . . I barely remember them, the parents who were nothing. After learning about them, I wasn’t sure I ever even wanted to have a child.”

Ben came forward and perched himself on the very end of the bed as he listened with intent eyes. He’d always been good at that, listening in silence as Rey told him her every deep, dark secret. Sometimes, she wondered if that’s what first drew her to him: when he’d listened to her in that hut on Ahch-To without judgment or fear.

“At first, after I found out, I thought about, well, ending it,” Rey’s eyes fell closed as she whispered that dark secret and she heard his sharp intake of breath at her confession, “but I couldn’t go through with it, not after I talked to your mother about it.”

“Of course, by the time I decided I wanted to keep her, I still had no idea how to tell you about it,” Rey added as her eyes opened to see him still sitting there, still listening, still Ben, “and it just kept getting easier and easier to not tell you, to not see you, until I had her in my arms and I read an article about a massacre ‘you’ inflicted.”

“I didn’t–,”

“I know.”

All of a sudden, the cuff around her forearm unclasped in the middle and released her from its Force-sucking power. Rey raised a brow at him as he flashed her a cocky smile. “I should’ve taken that off a while ago; I just wasn’t sure if you still wanted to kill me.”

“I’m still debating,” Rey quipped with a mirth-filled smile as she grabbed the Force-dampener and started to break it, but Ben snatched it from her hands before she could manage to do anything. “What are you doing?”

“I am going to make sure,” he paused as he snapped the cuff around his wrist and watched it power-up with a quick click, “that I can’t hurt you or Hope when he takes control of my mind again. You can take me if I don’t have the Force on my side.”

“I can take you when you do have the Force on your side,” Rey snapped cockily, though a part of her was glad he had the foresight to make sure that Hope would be okay whenever this Sith master made him fall off the rails again, “but the Force-dampener will make things easier.”

Ben opened his mouth to say something, probably to dismiss her claim of being able to take him while he still had the Force, but Hope started to shift in her sleep. They both turned to watch as her eyelids fluttered and then opened to slits, revealing a small flash of her hazel irises, before she opened them completely into a wide, saucer-like gaze of shock and confusion.

“M-Mom,” Hope stuttered and Rey reached forward to grab her hand in a firm, comforting grip. Hope turned to stare at Rey with those saucer-like eyes as she asked, “Why is Kylo Ren here? Where  _ is _ here? What’s going on?”

Rey watched Ben flinched at Hope’s use of his other name, the name of his evil side, but she knew he understood that there was no other person to her. Hope had only ever known him as the man her family was fighting against, the man the whole Resistance hated, the man they were supposed to defeat. Hope didn’t know he was her father.

“Hope, there’s so much I have to tell you, honey,” Rey croaked as she felt tears building in her eyes at how much her daughter might hate her when she finally told her the truth about her parentage, her father. “I just–I don’t know how.”

Ben looked between the two of them as a sullen and almost strange silence fell over the room like a thick, suffocating blanket. After a long moment of no one even knowing how to breathe properly, Ben cleared his throat and said, “I’m going to go make some caf. Would you like some, Rey?”

“Mom doesn’t really drink caf,” Hope answered for her with a questioning look on her face. “She stopped a while back because she said it wasn’t good for her body.”

“She’s right about that,” Ben replied with a chuckle as he headed for the door.

He hung around in the doorway to turn and glance over his shoulder before heading towards where the kitchen was in this place. It was a desperate and pleading glance, full of dark eyes and pouty lips, but Rey had no way to decipher it all the way because he turned away and left before she could even really bring herself to question it.

Rey sighed inwardly, thanking the Force that Ben knew this was a conversation she couldn’t have with him around, and then she turned towards her daughter to find her already staring right at her with those imperceptible eyes of hers, eyes that she, of course, inherited from Rey herself.

“What?”

“He’s our enemy, Mom,” Hope whispered urgently. “What are we doing here with him? We should be back with the Resistance.”

Rey settled on saying, “Honey, there are so many things you don’t know,” though she knew the words didn’t do any justice to the situation she was about to illuminate to her daughter. “There are so many things I wish I’d told you before all of this.”

Hope’s bottom lip shot out in the same way her father’s sometimes did as she crossed her arms over her chest and snapped, “Like what, huh? Spill the polta beans, Mom.”

Rey eyes squeezed closed of their own accord as she murmured, “He’s your father.”

“What?” Hope asked, but Rey knew she understood what she’d said by the way her voice shook and trembled.

“Kylo Ren is your father, Hope,” Rey spit out in a louder voice as she forced herself to meet her daughter’s gaze and tried not to flinch away from the tears she could already see sprouting in her usually bright, cheerful eyes. “I know it doesn’t make any sense to you, but it’s hard to understand all the . . . ,” Rey drifted off, unable to search for the right word to complete her thoughts.

“All the what, Mom?” Hope yelled as she scrambled across the bed, away from Rey. “Do you think it’s hard to understand that my father’s a murderer? I thought I was General Leia’s granddaughter, not some mass-murdering, tyrant’s kid.”

Rey flinched as she heard something in the room shatter, knowing that Hope’s anger and her growing powers had caused it.

“You are her granddaughter,” She explained wearily, knowing that this conversation was going to be long and tough and she was already tired of everything. “Ben is, was, Leia’s son.”

“Who’s Ben?” Hope yelled hysterically as she crawled off the bed and scrambled away to the corner of the room that was farthest from Rey. “We’re talking about Kylo Ren, Mom!”

“Kylo Ren,” Rey answered as she curled in on herself. “His real name is Ben, Ben Solo, and he is your father, whether you like it or not.”

“Well, I don’t like it,” Hope muttered just as Ben walked back into the room with a trembling smile on his face. Hope narrowed her eyes and her lip stuck out into another little pout. “I don’t like it at all.”

“We’ll discuss this some more later, Hope,” Rey stated as she stood and crossed over to Ben, knowing that he would’ve only walked in during their conversation if something were happening, something bad. “Please, try and get some more rest. I have a feeling we’re going to have a rough couple of days ahead of us.”

Rey shut the door behind her as she followed Ben down the corridors of wherever they were to what looked like a command center. She frowned at the room in confusion. Rey was sure they weren’t on a ship, so what use could there be for a command center?

“This place used to be a rebel base during the Galactic Empire’s time,” Ben informed her, answering her unspoken question as he started to work on a couple of different things on the screens surrounding them. “It has an immense level of security that I thought you would appreciate, but it looks like the area has been breached.”

“By what?” Rey asked as she finally stepped forward to search what she could only guess where the security vids and seeing nothing. “There’s nothing on the vids.”

“Whatever it is,” Ben said as he shook his head in frustration when another screen came up blank, “it’s good at camouflage.”

Rey started to nod almost absentmindedly when she saw a flicker on the screen in the corner of her eye and she blurted, “Stop, stop,” without a care for how loud she was.

Ben paused the video just in time to see a spindly creature slithering around a set of dark branches near where Rey thought she saw a hidden entrance to this secret base that they were hiding out on. Rey’s head cocked to the side as she studied the creature, noting how it seemed to almost, but not quite match the drowning darkness of the night sky.

“What is that?” she asked in horror as she saw how truly terrifying it looked.

Its head was shaped like the old droids of the Empire and moonlight shone down on it, giving it its own little glimmer of light. It was skin and bones, like a skeleton, though it seemed to be able to move quickly and almost invisibly through the night.

“It’s a verpine,” Ben answered with awe in his tone. “I’ve never actually seen one in person, but that’s how they looked in all of my old books.”

She watched as Ben clicked the play button and the vid started up again to reveal the creature heading over to the panel of the base’s hidden door and overriding it somehow without even touching it. Rey watched in horror as the door slid open and the creature slipped inside without a single alarm going off.

“Ben, when was that?”

Ben checked the time on the bottom and his eyes shot up to hers in panic as he replied, “Fifteen minutes ago.”

They both started running towards the door when they heard a high-pitched scream that sent fear jolting into Rey’s heart and soul. The Force pounded around her as Rey took off running, not even bothering to wait for Ben to catch up, and nearly threw herself into Hope’s room to find it–

“Empty,” Ben murmured in confusion and desperation and every single feeling that was clogging up Rey’s chest and throat and every other part of her body. “No, no, it can’t be–It can’t be empty because then that would mean that–,”

“He has her,” Rey answered for him in a low tone that scared even her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the greatest comments and the awesome amount of kudos! I really only started this as a one-shot, but I'm really getting into the story and I'm eager to see how I'll develop it! Let me know in the comments if there's any characters or planets you guys want to see (from the movies, shows, or books), especially any badass female Sith or Jedi, and I'll try to add in what I can as long as it fits with what I'm thinking.
> 
> (P.S., I feel like Hope may seem really mature for a seven-year-old in this chapter, but I was going with the thought that this kid has lived with an organization considered to be a terrorist organization her whole life and she's been trained to be one of their warriors in the future, so I feel like a typical seven-year-olds emotions about dolls and pretty pink ponies where nothing is wrong in the world wouldn't fit with her character and how she was raised.)


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I switched POV's just a little in here, but I felt like we needed to tell a little bit more of the story from others in it, such as certain Resistance members.

_ ⸺ A Resistance Ship in the Middle of Deep Space ⸺ _

⸻  _ Finn  _ ⸻ 

“What just happened?” Finn murmured as his eyes fluttered open and he found himself staring up into a set of dark brown orbs that he’d seen too many times to count yet never got used to. A warm hand grazed his cheek, sending tingles down his spine, and he managed to croak out a single word: “Poe.”

“How’re you feeling?” Poe muttered as he leaned in closer to Finn, looking relieved that he was awake. “You’ve been out for so long; we were starting to get worried about you.”

“How long was I out?” Finn asked as he forced himself to sit up and winced at the pain that cracked through his skull like a whip lashing against him. “Force, that hurts.”

“Yeah, it’s gonna,” Poe said as he reached out and ran a finger down the side of Finn’s temple, sending jolts of electricity flaring down Finn’s face. “You hit your head pretty hard. I heard the crunch when it hit the wall and I thought you were dead.”

Finn nodded, not wanting to hear the rest. “So, what happened?” he asked as he finally managed to cast a glance around with pain splitting through his head. All his friends and family were either right beside him or in the rest of the medbay beds, except for one. “Where’s Rey?”

Poe sucked in a breath and his hand clenched around the metal bars of the medbay bed. Finn looked up with a questioning draw to his brows to see genuine sadness and despair in Poe’s dark, dark eyes; that is, once Poe managed to even look Finn in the eyes, Finn saw those emotions flaring like a livewire. He knew something was very wrong.

“Where’s Rey? Where’s Hope?” Finn asked with a full-on fury as he started to try and wrangle himself free from the cords that were hooked into him. Rey was like Finn’s sister and Hope was the closest thing Finn thought he’d ever have to a niece, maybe even a child. If they were gone . . . “What happened? Where are they, Poe?’

“We’re not for sure yet,” Poe answered diplomatically, though Finn noticed the dark glint in his eyes, the way his jaw muscles twitched, and Finn knew he was lying. “We think they were taken by Kylo Ren when he and the First Order attacked our base.”

“No,” Finn started to shake his head rapidly as that same word just kept flying past his lips, “No, no, no,” over and over again. He grabbed Poe’s jacket and pulled him closer as he yelled, “He’ll kill her, Poe! Do you understand? She kept Hope from him for seven fracking years . . . Force, he’ll destroy her!”

Poe’s mouth twitched but only to flatten itself into a thin line before he said, “I don’t think so. He’s had plenty of times to do so before and she’s still alive.”

“She had hid a child from him for seven Force-damned years during those ‘plenties of times’,” Finn snapped as he finally found it within himself to stand so he was face-to-face with Poe and not lower than him. “The anger, the rage, that burns inside him is more than enough to make him commit even the most heinous of crimes. He’ll kill her.”

“I can’t just magically pinpoint her, Finn,” Poe shot back as his own anger reared its ugly head, catching the attention of every other person in the room. After realizing what he’d down, Poe shot them all an apologetic glance and small smile before leaning in closer and lowering his voice to say, “I don’t have the Force, Finn. There’s no way for us to find where he’s taken her.”

“It hasn’t been like broadcast across the holonet by now?” Finn asked as confusion overtook him again.

Rey was supposed to be the number target against the First Order. She had the highest price on her head, triple the prices of the most notable Resistance fights put together, and her picture was flashed the most, yet her capture hadn’t been announced yet. Telling the Galaxy of her capture, shredding their hope to pieces, should’ve been the first thing the First Order did.

“Not yet,” Poe answered with a small shake of his head.

“Still,” Finn said, unrelenting, even as the information baffled him to no end, “we need to find some way to track her, somehow. There’s gotta be someone here who can–,”

“I can,” a small, lyrical voice said as a Twi-lek, no older than fifteen at the most, stepped forward with one of her headtails raised in the air. “Rey taught us how to sense another Force sensitive just a couple weeks ago.”

Finn and Poe glanced at each other before Poe opted to say, “Are you sure you can do that? You’re still a Padawan–,”

“Yes,” the Twi-lek answered without waiting for Poe to finish his sentence, “I can do it. It will take a couple hours of intense meditation since I’m still so new to it, but I can do it, I swear.”

Poe didn’t even wait for Finn to say anything before he nodded.

_ ⸺ Abandoned Rebel Base ⸺ _

⸻  _ Ben  _ ⸻ 

“Rey,” Ben murmured softly as he followed her through the old, abandoned base they’d holed up. Rey stormed through the halls like a rathtar, ready to destroy anything in her path, as her anger hit an all-time high. Ben, even with his long legs, was having trouble keeping up with her. “Rey, you need to calm down.”

Rey snorted derisively and shook her head. Ben could feel the emotions rolling around within her, broiling to the point of explosion, and he knew it was only a matter of time before she lost all control of the Force and her surroundings. He’d always felt how close Rey could get to the Dark side, how much farther her anger put her away from the Light, but he’d never felt her this dangerously close to falling.

“Rey, calm down,” Ben said as he grabbed her arm above her elbow and pulled her to a stop. She turned on her heel and shot him a laser-hot glare that sent him reeling, but he didn’t let her anger deter him. He wasn’t going to let her fall from the Light. “You need to take a deep breath, Rey. We will find her, but anger isn’t going to help.”

“We need to hurry,” Rey replied as she turned and started rushing again. “They could still be on the planet. If we could get to a ship–,”

“They’re not still on the planet, Rey.” Ben shut her hope’s down with that one sentence. Again, he pulled her back to him and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. She felt herself melting into the embrace as he whispered into her hair, “I promise we will find her, Rey. I won’t stop until we do.”

“What about when he controls your mind again?” Rey asked as she pulled back, already wary of the inevitable. “What about when Ben Solo isn’t with me anymore?”

⸻  _ Rey  _ ⸻ 

Whoever was controlling Ben, they were much stronger than Snoke, much more powerful. They held Ben’s mind like it was a scared animal in a trap, a trap that Ben couldn’t seem to free himself from. Snoke had been seducing Ben with dreams of grandeur, while this entity flat-out held him in his grip, and Rey was worried that would be their downfall.

“I don’t think he can,” Ben said in a bit of a daze as he seemed to dig back into the darkness of his mind, “at least not yet. I will let you know if or when I feel him coming after me again, but I haven’t felt his claws once yet.”

Rey nodded, though a piece of her wasn’t very reassured by his statement. She was sure that no piece of her would be reassured until she was holding her daughter in her arms and Ben had his mind completely his own again.

“Who would take her?” Rey murmured after a long moment of silence. She couldn’t even think of a person who would know about her being anything other than Rey’s daughter, which was important but not important to warrant kidnapping. “Who could have known we were here?”

Ben shrugged as his brows knitted together and she knew he was trying to think of any possible ways he could have accidentally let their location slip. He shook his head with a huffed sigh as he explained, “I disabled the tracking device on my ship and shut off all communications. Nobody knows about this place but me. It’s not even in the Resistance’s records.”

Rey’s shoulders slumped as she tried to think of another way they could be tracking him. Her eyes stayed on him as she did so and, when he scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck and winced, Rey zeroed in on the action. “What’s on your neck?” she asked out of concern and curiosity and something more.

Ben shook his head. “It’s nothing, just a cut, I think,” he answered nonchalantly, though there was a weird look in his eyes, probably because Rey was looking at him like one of her machines before she fixed them.

“Turn around,” Rey commanded and he obeyed, though he did so in a somewhat confused manner, allowing Rey to search his neck with her eyes and her hands.

She rubbed her fingers flatly along the muscle there and found a single spot where it was hard, harder than the rest of the area, and was only in a square patch. It looked as if there had been a scar there once, but it had been removed and cleared. 

“There’s something here,” she whispered to herself as she tried to sense the object in the Force and found that all she could get was some kind of technological symbol. “I think they put a tracking device in you, but I can’t be sure until I remove it.”

“If it was the First Order,” Ben reasoned as he reached around and felt at the object in question, surprise blanking his features, “why wouldn’t they have taken all three of us? Why take the little girl?”

“Easy to control, easy to rehabilitate, easy to seduce to the Dark side,” Rey chirped, though the thought of anyone from the First Order touching her baby made her heart beat in an unsteady staccato that almost caught her off-balance. “You know how easy it is to be meddled with and changed at that age.”

Ben swallowed so thickly that Rey could hear it before he croaked, “Yes, yes, I do,"  in such a pained voice that Rey had to wonder what all he’d endured under Snoke and his careful conditioning of Ben when he was a young padawan aspiring to be a great Jedi. "I won't let that happen to her, Rey."

“We’ll have to remove the tracker,” Rey commented lightly to change the subject as she felt along the edges of the device, her cold fingers tingling against Ben’s warm skin, and found where it began and ended. “I have no training to do such a thing, but I think I can manage if you wish me to do it.”

“Do it,” Ben commanded without a single hint of hesitation in his voice. “Do it quickly so we can start hunting the slimeball that stole our daughter.”

Rey grabbed the hidden knife she always kept in her boot and poised it over the skin of his neck as she said, “Alright,” and cut deep into his skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the comments and the kudos and the bookmarks! You guys are the best! I've had a long weekend so I've been able to push out more chapters than I'll be able to over the course of this week, but I'll try to keep you guys from waiting too long for the next chapter.


	5. Chapter Five

⸻  _ Hope  _ ⸻ 

Hope woke to a strange, clicking noise sputtering close to her. For a moment, she wondered if the heater the living room had broken down, _ again _ , until memories of the past day flashed across her mind, telling her that she wasn’t in the small apartment-like area of the compound designated for her and her mother.

“Ah, it seems the little Jedi has awoken,” a rough, raspy voice quipped, though her eyes were still closed. A leathery finger stroked down the curve of her cheek, making nausea rise in her stomach. She felt someone’s breath against her ear as a whispered voice said, “Open your eyes, little Jedi, before I make you.”

Hope’s eyes snapped open to find a man with mottled green skin and a long, black ponytail—he was a falleen, she was sure of it—staring down at her, his eyes boring into her with a strange glimmer that made her whole body go on red-alert. He crossed his muscular arms over his chest as he sent a smirk towards the sentient, yet metallic creature to his right.

She was sure the falleen’s partner was the source of softly clanking noise she’d awoken to. He looked like his whole head made out of metal. The rest of him was spindly, a figure that would have made any human look weak and sickly, yet his muscles were lean and pronounced. He stared down at her, too, with dark, dark eyes that she never wished to look at again.

“Who are you?” Hope asked as confidently as she could manage. She squeezed her eyes shut at the way her voice trembled with the words, relaying her fears to them as if she’d just told them outright that was so terrified her heart was beating like those of hummingbirds on Naboo.

“We do not matter, child,” the falleen answered as he found a seat on the bunk across from hers and pulled out a long, shining blade from behind his back. She watched his every movement as he pulled out a cloth and started to swipe it across the blade’s edges, cleaning away whatever dust could not be seen by her eyes. “We are not the ones you should fear.”

“You abducted me,” Hope insisted, though the words were like dust in her mouth. They’d abducted her, sure, but from what? Her mother had obviously had a mental breakdown, thinking that Kylo Ren, the Kylo Ren, could be Hope’s father. It was impossible. “You stole me away from my mother.”

The mechanical creature whirred something in a foreign language that she didn’t recognize and Hope squinted at it until it turned its head to the falleen as if to tell him to translate, though the falleen didn’t seem to care.

“Your mother  _ and _ your father,” the falleen corrected with a nod to his friend, giving Hope the impression that the mechanical creature had said that first. “We stole you away from  _ both _ your parents, right out from under their noses.”

“Kylo Ren _ is  _ not my parent,” Hope snapped and crossed her arms over her chest as a violent, furious rush of blood flushed her cheeks. She knew, deep, deep down, that she should probably be nice to the men who were holding her captive, but she just couldn’t stop the words from falling from her lips. “I am not his daughter and I never will be so you can take your kriffing bounty or whatever it is you have and you can shove it up your kriffing–,”

“Woah, woah, woah, kid,” the falleen said as he chuckled silently, a grin of pure, undiluted mirth breaking across his green face. “No need for foul language, eh? I get not wanting to be the daughter of a mass murderer, but ya get what ya get, right, Whir?”

His mechanical friend nodded, though its almost black eyes seemed to drill into his friend with something nowhere even close to amusement as his friend cackled and cackled like he’d said the funniest thing in the world.

“As for the bounty,” the falleen started as he finally stopped wheezing past his laughter, “I couldn’t forget it even if I wanted to. Turning you in is going to make me one of the richest men in the Galaxy.”

Her small, glimmering hope that she could've struck a chord with him vanished almost instantly. She knew greed, knew what it did to people. Aunt Rose had taught her about Canto Blight, where greed had broken the backs of some of the fiercest creatures she’d ever seen, and Hope believed her, believed in the far-off look that always accompanied those stories.

_ One of the richest men in the Galaxy?  _ Hope thought to herself as she scrunched her face together in puzzlement of his words. Who would pay that much for her? She wasn’t a Jedi like her mother.  _ I’m not even a padawan yet,  _ Hope thought glumly. There had to be some reason, though, some reason that she automatically connected to her supposed father. Who wouldn’t want to get their hands on the daughter of the most hated man in the Galaxy?

“Where are you taking me?” Hope finally asked, thinking that she could try and figure out who might’ve stolen her if she knew where she was being taken.

The falleen looked to his friend who had suddenly turned his head down to the floor as if he could drill a hole through it with nothing but his gaze. When the falleen turned his gaze back to her, a blood-thirsty, sinister smirk spread across his lips, he hissed, “A world of nightmares awaits you, little Jedi.”

⸻  _ Finn  _ ⸻ 

“Are you almost done?” Poe asked the twi-lek girl as she continued to meditate where she was, her cross-legged figure floating in midair. It was probably the third time he’d asked that question in as many minutes and Finn could almost feel irritation radiating from the girl’s supposedly calm body.

After receiving no answer, Poe sighed and stormed across the room. “I’m going to eat,” he called out as he left the room in a huff that had Finn raising his brows but not saying a word.

“Your husband should learn the skill of patience,” the twi-lek girl—he thought her name was Gen—hummed as she continued to meditate with her eyes closed. “To the Jedi, patience is one of the highest virtues because it allows us to formulate plans that actually work rather than plans that are doomed to fail.”

“He’s just high-strung,” Finn offered as a form of apology, though he winced as he realized that it was only sort-of true, but he continued to explain, “He’s running the Resistance with barely any funds and we’ve just lost our Jedi warrior.”

“Hmm,” Gen murmured, though her face didn’t change as the noise left her lips. “You are doing the same, are you not, Commander? Yet, you stand firm and calm in the face of unrest within your ranks.”

“I . . . “ Finn searched for the right words to explain, but found that he couldn’t even think of them, not when she wasn’t lying. While Poe was the man chosen to replace Leia after she’d rejoined the Force, Finn had been the one to take over command of the Resistance’s fighters, of the battles they fought, and of everything that Poe couldn’t be bothered to deal with when his temper spiked. “I do what I must,” was all Finn could muster.

“Sometimes, what we must do and what we need to do,” Gen paused her wistful words as she finally opened her eyes and her body floated down the floor calmly, almost like a leaf falling from a tree, “are two very different things.”

Finn watched in amazement as she stood and brushed the dust from her knees without much care for the way his heart was thumping in his chest, beating for her to speak, pounding for her to tell him where his best friend in the whole Galaxy was. “Did you see her?” he asked quietly, almost shyly. “Is she okay?”

Gen cocked her head to the side as she considered his questions. Finally, she shook her head. “I did not see her,” she admitted, forcing his hopeful smile to fall, “but I did feel her and where she could be in relation to the Galaxy, but she was on the move, probably on a ship.”

“So, you think they’re still traveling to wherever Ren is taking her?” Finn prodded, wanting, no, needing to know more.

“I assume so,” Gen answered, though her brow was knitted and confused, “but there’s something else.”

“What?” Finn blurted almost before she could make out the words. “What’s wrong? Is she okay? What’s happened?”

Gen’s pearly white teeth bit into the flesh of her lower lip as she turned dark, sad eyes on him and, almost fearfully, whispered, “I didn’t feel Hope with her.”

White hot fear lanced through Finn as those words left her lips.  _ No, no, no,  _ he thought to himself, repeating the word in his head as he processed the information. Hope had to be with Rey, she had to be. Rey would never, ever leave Hope behind, not for anything in the world. “What does that mean? Is she–,” Kriff, he couldn’t even make the word march past his lips.

“No, I would have felt it had she died,” Gen assured him, “but I don’t know where she is. I’ll have to meditate again; this time, I’ll do it on her signature. I’ll be able to find her, wherever she is, unless they're masking her signature through the Force.”

Finn had no idea what she meant, but he nodded. If he asked about every confusing thing that happened in the Force, he’d never had time to do anything. Besides, he didn’t care what Gen did with the mystical powers of the Force, so long as she found Hope safe and sound wherever she might be in this huge galaxy of theirs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, guys! Sorry this chapter is a little short! I don't like writing in either Finn's perspective, nor do I like writing in Hope's, but I think it's necessary for the story to show what is happened outside of the Rey and Ben show; also, I have a brilliant idea for who paid for Hope to be abducted that I'm really excited for, which is why I had to include the little convo between her and the falleen and his accompanying friend, Whir. Anyways, let me know what you like, what you don't, and what you think would be cool for me to include in some way. Thanks for reading and liking! Y'all are awesome!


End file.
